20090602

For as long as I can remember, and before ever I knew its meaning, the word 'pagan' has evoked feelings of longing, beauty, and half-memories in my soul, and before I knew where to find expression of my pagan longing or even the form of it, my heart ached for its strange elusive fascination - as formless as the scents of Midsummer, but as bewitching and alluring, and drawing always on and deeper. The same is true of the word witch', a woman who brews in her cauldron such a brew as I later discovered was prepared for Afagddu, in her hope, her love and her sorrow, by Ceridwen, but it was the image that called to my soul because I knew, though not with my mind, that the image was only a little distorted, and the real was deep, dark, and old. I came, by chance, to a reference to Pan and the Moon Goddess, and again there was that strange call, and I needed no more than those mere words to revive something in me and remind me of things I had known of the moon kith. But it was always just over the hill, where the Sun was setting, or lost in the scents of the grass and clover, or strangely joined to the male fern that grew in our garden (and I didn't know then the fern lore of Faerie). Now it doesn't need emphasis to say that a person in whose soul these things begin to stir again is going to feel lonely, as a Celt among Saxons, or as a fern in the dry lands of the east. So perhaps I should admit, for it may be true, that I don't write for the earnest 'enquirer', but rather because of the pain and longing in my soul, in the hope that others of us would hear and together we would find the Moon Maiden. It isn't the enquirer, however earnest, that I want to attract, but rather, the pagan who already knows the call of Faerie but needs help and companionship in tracing it to its source.